KUWAIT: The Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor is looking into a recommendation to set a separate budget for the Labor Public Authority when it prepares the budget for the 2014/2015 fiscal year which starts in April next year. The recommendation was made by Assistant Undersecretary for Financial and Administrative Affairs Dr Husain Al-Duwaihees in a letter to Undersecretary Abdulmuhsin Al- Mutairi, which was in response to a letter from Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sheikh Salem Al-Sabah. The letter quoted by Al-Qabas yesterday provides procedures that need to be carried in order to start 'separating' the ministry's budget. They mention the need to outline the 'organizational structure' for the Labor Public Authority which includes naming directors and staff, including a general director for the authority.
The procedures also call for changing the ministry's name into 'The Ministry of Social Affairs' after the labor department becomes an independent entity. While the parliament passed the law to establish the Public Labor Authority earlier this year, there has since been no set date for it to start operating, but the recent report seems to suggest that it could not happen before the start of the fiscal year. The new authority is hyped as an imminent replacement for the sponsorship system by exclusively handling the affairs of expatriate labor forces including hiring in local companies. It was passed to answer demands which call for scrapping the present system that has fallen under pressure for years for its responsibility over injustice workers often complain from.
The main drawback of the sponsorship system are loopholes that allow visa traffickers to release work permits on fake companies or nonexistent job openings (the sponsorship system sets a cap for the maximum number of employees a company can hire), then sell them to unskilled labor forces looking for a chance to work in the oil-rich Gulf region. Once they reach Kuwait, workers in most cases end up with no jobs, resort to accepting hard labor and often live without valid visas. Minister of Social Affairs and Labor Thekra Al-Rashidi had identified those workers as the target of a plan announced last March to deport 100,000 foreigners every year as part of a scheme to cut the country's expatriate population by one million within a decade.
There are nearly 90,000 people living illegally in Kuwait according to official figures, and those along with workers doing menial jobs are often referred to in government rhetoric as 'marginal labor forces'. Moreover, the sponsorship system lacks sufficient regulations to regulate the affairs of more than 800,000 domestic helpers in Kuwait. Kuwait, which is home to 2.6 million expatriates who make 68 percent of the country's 3.8 million population, has been the subject of rights groups' criticism in the past number of years over human rights violations resulting mostly from practices relating to deficiencies in the sponsorship system.
© Kuwait Times 2013
